Grindr outage not actually caused by Olympic athletes

If you’re a gay male heading to London with hopes of pining over and hooking up with Olympian athletes, you might have to do it the old fashioned way. Popular hook up app Grindr recently experienced some poorly-timed downtime, causing London’s The People to blame the app’s issues on the sudden influx of Olympians that had just arrived in town.

An adorable story, no doubt—even flattering for Grindr, which has 350,000 registered users residing in London. But while the people at Grindr are perhaps relishing the attention, the app was quickly restored and founder Joel Simkhai even wrote a blog post apologizing to users, “I know it was ­frustrating. I was ­frustrated myself. I also rely on Grindr in my day-to-day personal life. It made me feel disconnected.”

Simkhai and the team over at Grindr did say, however, that a connection between London’s Olympians and Grindr’s lag does not exist.

“While we'd love to believe that the best-built men in the world all dressed up in Lycra and congregating in one place can generate a huge increase in Grindr traffic, we can say with confidence that the arrival of the Olympic teams had little or no effect on our server," Grindr told the Daily Dot via email.

Only days ago, ESPN Magazine’s Sam Alipour told a story from inside Olympic Village, claiming that Olympic athletes of all sexual preferences don’t need apps to find each other for sex. Apparently, Olympic Village already provides the perfect playground for hot Olympians to hook up. Spectators, however, can stick to Grindr.